I BOOKS WHAT IS P'TACH? Parents for Torah for All Children. "P'TACH," is a national non-profit organization which provides secular and Jewish education for children with learning • disabilities who are enrolled in our schools. Before P'TACH existed, the doors of almost all day schools were indeed closed to children with all levels of learning disabilities, and the parents of these special children were often frustrated by a community that failed to recognize the need for providing special educational programs in our schools. Now, through P'TACH, the doors of our schools are "OPEN" to all our children. The Michigan branch, P'TACH of Michigan, Inc., was founded in May of 1979 by a group of parents, lay people and professionals in fields related to special education. Our main objective is to provide special education for learning disabled children with the goal of mainstreaming them into regular classrooms whenever possible. Today, P'TACH has grown to serve over twenty children in its two programs. Unfortunately, due to a lack of financial resources, children are currently on a waiting list to enter P'TACH's programs. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION P'TACH of Mich., Inc. 18150 Alta Vista Southfield, Michigan 48075 (313) 399-6281 All donations are tax deductible LENORE GURWIN WOULD LIKE TO THANK HER DOCTORS & NURSES AT SINAI HOSPITAL FOR THEIR WONDERFUL CARE DURING HER RECENT ILLNESS. ALSO LENORE'S MANY LOVING FRIENDS, HER CHILDREN ► HUSBAND, JERRY GURWIN. 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"I saw this as a very impor- tant example of the prob- lems of Jews in positions of authority," Rubin says. "It was a genuine tragedy in a number of respects." This issue of whether substantial numbers of Jews could have been saved from the Nazis haunts Rubin's book. An- other example involved the bizarre mission of Joel Brand to Istanbul. In April, 1944, Brand, a leader of the Jewish underground in Budapest, was picked up by the Nazis and delivered to the office of Adolf Eichmann, who was in the process of liquidating Hungarian Jewry. Eichmann had a strange proposal, Rubin writes. Brand would fly to Istanbul and offer to trade "blood for merchandise," in Eichmann's unforgettable words. The merchandise in- cluded 10,000 trucks, 800 tons of tea, 800 tons of cof- fee, 200 tons of cocoa and 2 million bars of soap; the blood involved the release of 1 million Jews. Brand was told that if he did not con- vince the Allies to accept the offer, the Jews would die—including his own fami- ly. But the British suspected an elaborate Nazi propagan- da plot, or an attempt to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and her two primary allies, the United States and Great Britain. They removed Brand to Cairo under virtual house arrest—and put off the Zionist leaders who desper- ately wanted the Allies to play along with the German gambit, if only to save a small remnant of the prom- ised one million. "The ques- tion has been hotly debated for years," Rubin says. "One of the things I was able to show was that this was a serious offer by the Germans. Two things were behind it: corruption, and the fact that Himmler, who realized that people were trying to overthrow Hitler, was trying to build a bridge to the Allies to diminish some of his responsibility for the Holocaust." Eichmann even sent a trainload of Jews destined for a death camp to Switzer- land to show his good faith — a signal that the Allies chose to ignore. "It's abso- lutely clear to anybody who studies this matter that 800,000 to a million of those who died during the Holo- caust could have been res- cued," he says. "This was true even as late as 1943. One primary reason they weren't was because the British refused to let Jews into Palestine. So on one hand, people like Thddy Kol- lek were in Istanbul saving thousands of people. On the other, they were terribly upset because they knew they could be saving hun- dreds of thousands. It was just a terrible psychological strain for the Zionists." In this sense, he says, Istanbul stands as a monument to both the heroism and the futility of the rescue effort. Rubin is convinced that the history of this period is crit- ical for an understanding of the current situation in the Middle East. "What I think my book shows, historically, is the very real problems the Jews faced because of not having a state of their own, not being able to depend on an existing state. It is a re- minder to others of the situ- ation out of which Jews cre- ated Israel. And what happened in Istanbul clearly shows the costs of a policy of appeasement." For Rubin, whose eight other books have been detailed studies of subjects like the State De- partment and the revolution in Iran, Istanbul is clearly a subject of some am- bivalence. On one hand, Istanbul's wartime intrigues have the exotic flavor of a Graham Greene novel. But the meaning of what happened in Istanbul was tragic for Europe's Jews; here, Rubin sees only horror and the unforgivable unwill- ingness of the Allies to come to grips with that horror. "The Holocaust was created by the German Nazis," he writes, "but it was implemented with collabora- tion by some states and pas- sive acquiescence by others. These events were clear from Istanbul, as was the lesson that Jews had to act on their own through their own nationalist move- ment—and eventually their own state." ❑ I NEWS I New Drive Planned To Aid Soviet Emigres Washington (JTA) — Brac- ing for the arrival in the United States of some 18,000 Soviet Jews by Dec. 31, leaders of major Jewish philanthropic agencies have asked local Jewish com- munity federations to reset- tle dramatically higher numbers of Soviet Jews than they have so far this year. On average, the par- ticipating federations will be asked to absorb three times as many Jews per month in the next three months as they had for each of the first nine months of the year. By taking some of the ab- sorption burden off of the New York Association of New Americans, which is funded through money rais- ed around the country for in- ternational needs, the move is designed to channel a higher share of the Jewish philanthropic dollar to Israel for the purpose of settling Soviet Jews there. That is also the motivation behind an announcement last week that the United Jewish Appeal and the Council of Jewish Federa- tions have begun planning a sequel to this year's $75 million Passage to Freedom campaign. The new campaign will earmark a greater propor- tion of funds for Israel's resettlement needs than the current campaign's 50-50 split, UJA National Chair- man Morton Kornreich said. The latest moves are part- ly a response to a major change in U.S. immigration policy that took effect Oct. 1. Since that date, Soviet Jews and others seeking to enter the United States as refu- gees have had to apply at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. U.S. authorities no longer grant refugee status to those who leave the Soviet Union on Israeli visas. In addition, the sheer number of Soviet Jews ex- pected to arrive in the United States this year has changed minds formerly opposed to a major effort to resettle the Jews here, said Rabbi Daniel Allen, assis- tant executive vice chair- man of the United Israel Appeal.